The problem with multicore processors isn’t that they have a lot of cores. I hope my IC designer colleagues don’t jump me when I say that having more than one core on a chip is a simple matter of cut and paste. The tricky part is getting all those cores to work together – a coordinated, efficient effort is key. After all, if it were enough for the cores to work independently, we would just use multiple single-core processors. To be sure, the devil is in the details of connecting cores and managing how they share resources.